1 week left until the JLPT, i still haven't memorized even half the grammar i need to but i'm going to just sit in my room and do that tomorrow i think. i got the tuberculosis test result (negative, of course) back, got the signed health certificate & mailed it in to the japanese school, so all my papers for the pre-VISA stuff have been given to them now. my new fellow exchange student is actually from estonia it seems. i'm gonna go look up if estonian is easier or harder than finnish to learn...

in the game i'm playing, Convenience Store Guy asked if i wanted to restart my game and switch servers to where there's a thriving (10+ people) japanese guild, so i did. everyone's really talkative, nice, and i'm definitely gonna learn a lot from them - they're talking way more and about way more random topics than the old guild did. i also said i have an interest in dialects so "don't hold back", and they all started talking in dialect haha - after a while they switched back but the guild leader's still using dialect, or if it's not dialect it's not normal japanese anyway (ex. おやすみん茶 "oyasumincha" for おやすみなさい "oyasumi nasai", goodnight).

there was one who seems like she has an actual interest in getting better at english but said she hates studying, so i said to go read manga in english and she was like "oh!! i'll do that starting tomorrow!!" and i said she should play pokemon in english too and she went "what?! that's been translated to english?!" hahaha!! then i PM'd her and told her about ROMs and scanlations and she's already looking them up now. i sure hope it helps.

it's midsummer, as in the holiday. there are mini midsummer poles up as decorations. parasyte is getting easier and easier to understand in japanese, though there's still tons of words i don't know. i started writing a hunter x hunter fic in esperanto.

recently they started selling "palm nectar" at the grocery store here, from thailand. 100% coconut nectar (= juice from coconut flowers), sterilized it says. sure i'll try it. it's a slightly opaque, white-ish liquid that tastes exactly like a cookie. i can only take like one sip at a time, it's really super sweet to me. if you heat it up (ex. i tried to make hot chocolate), the sweetness pretty much completely disappears so instead of using it in baking i'd just pour it on top of whatever i wanted to be sweet.

i don't THINK i've gotten sick from it. when i tried it i was already feeling slightly sick from some sausages so it's hard to tell, but at any rate it hasn't made me feel super sick (ex. throwing up, like real sugar would) at least. i looked it up, it's supposedly got tons of nutrients in it though how many of these are killed off when it's "sterilized" i don't know, and it has a GI index of around 20 (honey and bananas are closer to 50) so it's even easier on your body than other normal foods... someone was saying "GI" is bogus and we should be using some other system instead, i don't know anything about that.

apparently palm sugar is exactly this same thing, except boiled for hours longer. maple sugar and table sugar are also just once-natural things boiled for hours and hours so the shorter the boiling time the better i think. anyway i tried to look up the specific brand they sell here and i couldn't find ANYTHING about it online, there's a photo of it on wikipedia somewhere without a description, and that's it. it's really cheap ($1 for a beer-bottle amount) but i don't actually feel like drinking this is a good idea, as in even if it doesn't make me sick if my tastebuds get used to having really sugary stuff then all the rest of my food will taste like crap. or could it be that that only happens when you're eating actual really sugary stuff that causes sugar spikes so your body gets addicted....? nah, i don't want to chance it...